| This is a creative dissertation with a one-hundred and three page critical introduction preceding a one-hundred and twenty-four page, full-length screenplay titled "Calling to Yeti" after the title of Wislawa Szymborska's collection of poetry. The critical introduction examines Szymborska's poetry in relation to the postmodern theories that validate my thesis assigning postmodern characteristics to Szymborska's poetics as coincident with the historic events in and around Poland from 1939 through 1981. The full-length screenplay presents biographic elements of the Nobel Laureate, Wislawa Szymborska, based in fact along with imaginative elements using motifs from her poems.; The critical introduction is divided into ten sections. Section I, The Coincidence of Time and Space, relays the historical background of World War II, the postwar Stalinization of Poland, and the Polish Solidarity movement's successful liberation of Poland from the Soviet Union in 1989 with the election of Lech Walesa. It correlates Szymborska's publishing history with the historic timeline. Sections II through VIII discuss elements of postmodern theory that attribute the shift from modernist to postmodernist aesthetics to the historic events that Szymborska witnessed in Poland while developing her style. Her poems and poetics are examined. Section IX compares her aesthetic inclinations with those of other contemporary Polish literati, including Czeslaw Milosz, to contrast her distinctly postmodern qualities to their modernist tendencies. Section X identifies sources other than Szymborska's poems for scenes, settings, plots, and supporting characters in the screenplay. The supporting characters represent Milosz, Tadek Borowski, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Witold Gombrowicz as other significant Polish writers contemporary to Szymborska.; The full-length screenplay is set mainly in Poland, in Warsaw, Cracow, the Carpathian Mountains, and Gdansk. The opening scenes identify the Yeti as a mythic creature originating in the Himalayas, a motif which Szymborska adopts as a symbol for Stalin in one of her poems. The Yeti and similar animal motifs in the screenplay symbolize her emotional reactions to fame and other situations from her biographic storyline. |
